Jihad and Jew-Hatred:

Jihad and Jew-Hatred makes a major contribution to the understanding of radical Islamism by tracing the impact of European fascism on the Arab and Islamic world. Drawing extensively on German-language sources, Matthias Küntzel analyzes the close relationship that began in the 1930s between Nazi leaders and Muslim extremists, especially the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Mufti of Jerusalem. This path-breaking book provides compelling documentation of the Nazi roots of what became Islamo-fascism and jihadist terror.

This study demonstrates in historical detail how the Muslim Brotherhood has consistently placed the hatred of Jews at the center of its ideology and policies through an incendiary rhetoric that interweaves passages from the Koran hostile to Jews with elements of Nazi-style world-conspiracy theories. Ancient prejudice and modern fantasies have become a deadly combination.

Jihad and Jew-Hatred also explains how the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 led to the shift of the center of global antisemitism to the Arab world, laying the foundation for radical Islamist currents in and around the Muslim Brotherhood and more recent terrorist organizations.

Küntzel convincingly shows that antisemitism is no mere supplementary feature of modern jihadism, and certainly no afterthought but its defining ideological core. This hatred also goes far beyond questions of Zionism and Israel. For Islamism, not only is everything Jewish evil, but every evil is Jewish, as the writings of Sayyid Qutb and the Charter of Hamas clearly explain to anyone willing to read them. It was this Jew-hatred that fueled the Jihad of the 9/11 terrorists.